EDSBS CHARITY BOWL 2025: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

I signed up for a sports and viral internet fights newsletter with occasional intrusive gardening content; what is happening here? The Charity Bowl (known online as the #CharitibundiBowl) is an annual fundraising contest staged by the EDSBS extended universe in aid of New American Pathways, a full-service refugee resettlement nonprofit based in Atlanta. We’ve been putting on this celebration for well over a decade at this point, a number we were very happy to hit because in true EDSBS fashion, nobody can quite remember when we did the first one. If an offseason contest to out-fundraise rival football fans doesn't sound like something that interests you, come back next week for more of our splendid regular programming.

I arrived here via some non-newsletter avenue; where am I exactly? Hello! This is Channel 6, home to the collected creative output from Spencer Hall and Holly Anderson. You can read more about why this space exists here and get in touch with us here. If you'd like to read more of our work, you can sign up for our email list by clicking that button in the bottom right corner of your screen from anywhere on the site. During the football offseason (so, now) about half of our newsletters are free to read with email signup; a $10/month or $100/year subscription gets you access to all our newsletters plus the full story archive of the site.

Do I need to sign up for anything to participate in the Charity Bowl? Nope!

What’s EDSBS? A college football website founded in 2005 by Spencer Hall, where the brains behind Channel 6 were incubated.

Why New American Pathways? A couple career changes and several mergers ago, young Spencer Hall worked at one of New AP’s predecessor orgs. You can read more about that time, and what still moves us to work with these communities today, right here.

KEYS TO THE GAME

• The 2025 EDSBS Charity Bowl will kick off (football term) on Monday morning, April 14, via announcement on the New American Pathways Bluesky feed and Instagram grid. The game officially concludes on Friday evening, April 18, though we have been known to extend the contest into the weekend in pursuit of stretch goals.
• The New AP Bluesky feed will have the most up-to-date information regarding official stop/start times and scores. Our team will be camped out there all week to deliver updates and celebrate especially creative donations.
• New this year! You can get answers to questions that aren’t answered here, or flag any issues you run into, at our brand-new donor help desk, manned by hometown hero JacketDan. Dan can be reached on Bluesky or by emailing dannewampathway@gmail.com.
• The bowl splash page (linked further down, for reasons) is your home for everything else: A portal to submit your actual donations, a running unofficial tally of all the money we’ve raised so far, and links where you can learn more about New AP and their work.

HOW TO PLAY

• Once the launch has been announced on Monday, hit the splash page and click the green "DONATE" button, then navigate to the dropdown menu. You will see a long list of schools that have college football teams (and a few that don't, but we'll get to that). Select the institution you want to compete under, and type in your donation amount. At the end of the week, the team with the highest donation total will be declared the winner.
• By tradition, donations are typically made in the form of a football score or statistic that has sentimental value to the donor. ($70.33, for example, in memory of West Virginia’s infamous Orange Bowl romp over Clemson, or $26.28, to honor Barry Sanders’ world-beating single-season rushing record.)
• You’ll also have the option to make this one-time gift a quarterly or monthly recurring donation, which will earn a year’s worth of multiplier points for scoring purposes. Example: You’re donating $100 on behalf of Vanderbilt (Diego Pavia party!). If you make that donation a $100 quarterly pledge instead, Vanderbilt will be awarded a full year’s worth of donations to their team score – in this case, $400. A $100 monthly pledge will add $1,200 to your team score. (Note that recurring gifts, as well as corporate matching gifts, are not going to show up on the splash page running total right away, since we have to enter those manually.)
• Now comes the good part: TIME TO BRAG ABOUT YOUR GENEROSITY ONLINE. Post your donation receipt! (Don’t forget to redact any identifying info!) Tag Spencer. Tag New AP. Tag your school and your school’s famous alumni. Cheerfully bullying your friends and rivals into joining the game themselves is how we keep Bowl week festive and this operation growing.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, CONTINUED

Where is the link to donate? Right here on the splash page. It’s buried down here for a reason. Here is that reason, in very large letters:

IF YOU WANT YOUR DONATION TO COUNT TOWARDS THE 2025 CHARITY BOWL, DO NOT DONATE EARLY.

New AP gratefully accepts donations year-round, but if you make your donation before we launch this year’s tally, your gift will be recorded in last year’s database, and will not be counted towards this year’s score.

Can we donate more than once? You’re welcome to do so! ONCE IT’S TIME.

How do I donate via mobile? You can either navigate to edsbscharitybowl.com on your mobile browser, or text charitybowl25 to 91999 – again, AFTER THE BOWL LAUNCHES ON MONDAY MORNING.

I did it anyway. Can you go get it and add it to this year’s board? No. We’re very busy! Thank you for your money.

What on God’s green internet is the #CharitibundiBowl? The official contest hashtag. We’ve been doing this a while, and conversations around charitable giving have evolved in that time. So a few years back, we co-opted this fabulous, short-lived Boca Raton Bowl name for our own purposes. Most people still call it the Charity Bowl. Y’all can fight about that amongst yourselves.

New Awhatican What Now? New American Pathways supports refugee families resettling in America from the day they touch down at the airport until the day they take their citizenship exams. As you might imagine, this encompasses a huge range of services, from finding safe housing, getting children enrolled in school and adults in job training, to language classes, legal aid, and after-school programs. You can read their annual impact report here, and check out their Facebook and Instagram pages to learn how their work shapes communities in and around Atlanta.

What’s a refugee? A refugee has been forced to flee their home country because of war, violence, or a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Refugee status in the United States means that a refugee has applied for resettlement abroad and has been granted the opportunity to resettle here. Applicants undergo a lengthy 13-step screening process conducted by the U.S Department of State and U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

What’s happening with New AP and refugees in the wake of recent executive orders? We’ll let them tell you:

Between January 21 and February 24, the Trump Administration issued an executive order halting U.S. refugee resettlement, freezing all resettlement funding, and terminating its contracts with ten national resettlement agencies. One of these was New AP’s national resettlement partner. These actions led to the indefinite suspension of the U.S. refugee resettlement program, leaving thousands of refugees – including unaccompanied minors – without a pathway to safety.

This situation is dynamic, with court challenges and appeals ongoing. In the meantime, New AP’s services to refugees already here in Georgia continue. New AP is stable for now but is planning for an uncertain future ahead. Like many non-profit organizations across the country, we anticipate further cuts to federal programs and additional losses of federal funding. We are preparing to lose 50% of our current operating budget by 2026 and are most concerned about losing funding for critical services like intensive case management for vulnerable refugees, employment/workforce development, and services for refugee youth.

New AP’s social platforms will be updated with the most current information regarding refugees entering America as events warrant.

Where do New AP refugees come from? All over. In 2024, New AP welcomed refugees from Myanmar, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Eritrea, Cuba, Haiti, and Venezuela.

Can I run my own Charity Bowl contest just for my school? Absolutely. Cal rocketed into the top ten in 2023 thanks entirely to a small group of alumni trying to one-up each other. As long as your donations are recorded after our official launch on April 14 (Monday morning) and before midnight on April 18 (Friday night), they’ll be counted.

What about corporate matching? Yes, we accept your bosses’ money! Added incentive: All matching donations that can be verified by your employer before the end of the Bowl will be added to the leaderboard. To have your matching gift verified and scored, contact Carina Buchwald {cbuchwald@newamericanpathways.org}

I’m trying to donate another way. Help? We’ll do whatever we can to make it work. If you’re making a donation via a family foundation/donor advised fund/trust account, donating over $1000 and trying to avoid credit card processing fees, donating from overseas, donating via wire transfer, want to make a gift of stock or other appreciated securities, or have any other questions, please contact Carina Buchwald {cbuchwald@newamericanpathways.org} and Nancy Gaddy {ngaddy@newamericanpathways.org} for assistance.

How much money did we raise last year? Last year was a landmark campaign in Bowl history. For the first time ever, we cracked the million-dollar mark, with an initial tally combined with matching corporate donations that ended up totaling $1,171,087.

Wow, what else has this extremely normal college football collective done? Several years ago, thanks to your rampaging generosity, we were able to establish the EDSBS Empowerment Fund. This fund covers a range of smaller needs that arise for refugees and their families outside the major programs offered by New AP. A typical use might involve paying for driving lessons so that parents can commute to their new jobs, and covering childcare during those lessons.

Who won last year’s Bowl? This answer gets funnier every year: For a mind-bending streak of many years now, that school has been Michigan, and for almost as long a time, the second-place school has not come particularly close. Is this the year that narrative is finally challenged? We’ll all find out together! Aren’t you tired of making Spencer get Michigan-themed tattoos? Don’t answer that!

I can’t afford to make a splashy donation. Should I even bother competing? Look, if there’s anybody who understands this, it’s a bunch of millennials working in digital media. But! We say this every year, and it keeps on being true: The VAST majority of donations we receive every year are in the $20 range. $10 is welcome. $5 is welcome. It all helps. So how does Michigan keep winning? The schools at the top of the leaderboard all tend to have one or two big-money donors bumping them up the ranks, but even at Michigan, the $20 donors outstrip everybody else by volume. The Wolverines keep winning because they have HORDES of donors. Wanna topple them this year? Do what they do: Get your friends involved.

We also understand that given the current state of upheaval both at home and abroad, you may not be able to make your planned contributions to the Bowl this year. If you can still share news about the Bowl with your families, coworkers, alumni clubs? That's fantastic. Again: It all helps. Every bit of it. Every one of you. We're just a loose collective of football idiots yelling into the internet. None of this is possible without y'all.

How can I share the good news of this fine and honorable campaign? Thanks for asking! We've got a handy PDF version of this post that you can download and circulate to your own networks right here:

TROUBLESHOOTING: IT WOULDN'T BE AN EDSBS EVENT WITHOUT SOME WEIRD HICCUPS

RECURRING HEADACHES RECUR, RECURRINGLY
Some of you will remember from last year that, on the donation platform New AP uses, we have no way of rolling a recurring donation over from last year’s contest to the 2025 campaign. Yes, it’s a pain in the ass for us too. So. What does this mean for you?

IF YOU SET UP A 2024 RECURRING GIFT AND WANT IT SCORED FOR 2025, YOU HAVE TO CANCEL IT AND MAKE A NEW PLEDGE.

This is tedious, and we’re sorry about that! Please email Kareemah Muhammad at {kmuhammad@newamericanpathways.org} to make arrangements.

PAYPAL IS NOT OUR FRIEND
We have run into a ton of problems in the past trying to get recurring gifts to process via PayPal. If you want to make a recurring (monthly or quarterly) gift, it must be done via credit card. If that doesn’t work for you, contact Nancy Gaddy {ngaddy@newamericanpathways.org} for assistance in making alternate arrangements.

I DON’T SEE MY SCHOOL IN THE DROPDOWN! BIAS!! HATERS!!!
P E R F I D Y
If you've never participated in the Bowl before, you can skip this part. If you're a returning competitor, here's the deal: We had to stop adding schools to the dropdown menu a few years back, because even just trying to fit in every FBS program, it was becoming an absolute nightmare to get the whole thing to load on mobile. But since the inception of the Bowl, we've had a number of non-FBS programs emerge as major Bowl powers – and just as in football season, not every FBS team shows up to play.

With all that in mind, this year we're rolling out new parameters: In an effort to keep things as manageable as possible for the most people, this year’s dropdown is limited to teams that either donated a minimum of $1000 in 2024, OR had at least 10 individual donors.

SO. What does this mean for you? If you don’t see your school on the first scroll through, remember to check other likely places on the list. (Look for Southern California under USC, etc.) If you still don’t see your team, use the text box underneath the dropdown to write it in, and our loyal hive of data entry drones will add it to the scoreboard manually.

USE THE TEXT BOX WISELY.
If you write in some variation of ARP ARP ARP, or if your manual entry is otherwise not readily identifiable as a football team, the scoreboard operators might not have any idea which dog mascot you are cheering for, and have our full and complete blessing to add any indecipherable donation to any school of their choosing.

SPEAKING OF WHICH
The following incorporeal institutions are recognized as canon and have permanent places in the dropdown menu:

- Make Spencer Eat Cheese University
- Hand in the Dirt University
- Jetski Police Academy
- Naropa University
- PAY THEM KIDS THEIR MONEY
- Protect Trans Kids University
- Soviet Cat University
- SZD U Gold Trans Ams
- University of Night Ham
- Vacation Bible School

A FINAL WARNING

Please ESPECIALLY be your sweet selves when interacting with New AP folks, many of whom are former refugees themselves. The Wednesday afternoon data-entry volunteer who misfiled your Texas Tech donation under Texas State may not have the latest Big 12 realignment committed to memory, but they also might be working in their fourth language, so COOL IT.

THAT’S IT THAT’S ALL

It may take us a while to get there, but we didn’t come this far by being timid: The world is on fire, but our hearts are aflame, and we’re once again setting this year’s initial goal at $500,000. Dazzle us, won’t you?

See you Monday.

– S. & H.